Arts & Culture | Theater

Deeply flawed human beings making profound moral choices populate almost all of Arthur Miller’s plays. But the Jewish dramatist rarely dealt as explicitly with the world’s collective responsibility for the Jews of Europe as in his 1964 one-act play, “Incident at Vichy”; it centers on a group of nine men and a boy who have been rounded up by German military and French police in Vichy France, and who wait to be “inspected” to see if they are Jewish under the laws of the Nazi “puppet” regime.

When Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” debuted on Broadway in 1949, the idea that a common person could be the subject of tragedy was revolutionary. Willy Loman was about as humble a hero as one could imagine, a man whose whole life was a failure and a disappointment. That he could be Jewish, like his creator, occurred to few; this was a period, after all, in which American Jews were assiduously trying to shed most of the vestiges of their tradition, and to merge as fully as possible into the life of their adopted country.

Auschwitz-Birkenau. Majdanek. Treblinka. Bergen-Belsen. Sobibor. When we think of the Holocaust, the names of a handful of death camps spring immediately to mind — names that we recite ritually on Yom Kippur and on Yom HaShoah. But, as new research over the past decade has shown, there were more than 30 times as many forced labor camps as extermination camps, and the experience of their prisoners is still, for the most part, yet to be told.

Whether it was the crime of the century or a government frame-up of an innocent Jewish couple — or, as is more likely, something in the middle — the execution for treason of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg continues to send shockwaves through American culture. Among the most troubling and fascinating aspects of the case was the involvement of Roy Cohn, the (secretly) gay, corrupt Jewish attorney who prosecuted the Jewish couple. Two plays that opened last week in New York, Joan Beber’s “In Bed With Roy Cohn,” which imagines Cohn’s last days, and Karen Ludwig’s one-woman show, “Where Was I?” in which she recalls playing Ethel Rosenberg in the 1992 TV film, “Citizen Cohn,” testify to the unslackened grip of the Rosenberg case on our collective imagination.

While many Israelis express dissatisfaction with the country’s current crop of political leaders, Golda Meir’s reputation continues to grow — 37 years after she died. Kiev-born Meir (nee Meyerson), who served as prime minister from 1969-’74, is the subject of “Golda’s Balcony,” a one-woman show in which actress Tovah Feldshuh has starred for a dozen years.

Larry David was the muse behind the ever-eccentric George Costanza in "Seinfeld", so it is only fitting that Jason Alexander, who portrayed Costanza, should be taking over David’s character in his Broadway play, "Fish in the Dark."